George H W Bush

I read an interesting article that described Bush well.  He viewed himself more as a caretaker than a leader.  He didn't have the vision thing.  Per the Constitution, the president enforces laws that Congress passes which is how he saw his domestic position.  He had spent his life preparing for the Cold War and then it ended in the middle of his presidency.  With no Soviet Union, the country was willing to take a risk with an anti-war Democrat.

 

The first opportunity I had to vote in a presidential election, I voted against George Bush.  He won despite me.  The next time around, I voted for him.  He lost.  I have a very bad record with presidential voting and it all started with Bush.

 

The most memorable thing about President Bush is Dana Carvey.  What a terrific impression.

 

RIP

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

1991: Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), a successful writer and author, has fallen on hard times.  She has no job, her agent won't return her calls, she's months behind on rent, and her cat is sick.  It is so bleak that she takes a framed letter from Katherine Hepburn from her wall and sells it.  Later, while researching for a book she's planning, she encounters some letters that she pockets and sells.  This proves lucrative so she decides to write some originals.  When buyers start getting suspicious, she uses Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) to sell her forgeries.  Then the FBI arrive.

Billed as a biographical crime comedy, this had very little comedy.  Melissa McCarthy, who can be enormously funny, has almost no material here.  She is a sad alcoholic cat lady who has resorted to crime.  Lee is an unlikeable character throughout the movie.  Even when she tries to be funny, it is the sort of humor that is mean.  For instance, a used book seller didn't want the majority of the books she brought to the shop so she phoned him a few days later and said his apartment building was on fire.  What a sense of humor.  The scene where she and Jack discover that the cat has been pooping under her bed - and she had gone weeks without noticing - was just pathetic.  There is virtually no comedy and the main characters are terrible people.  Jack is a homeless homosexual alcoholic and drug abuser.  His only redeeming feature is he can be charming.  Lee doesn't even have that.

 

This is the unfunny story of a criminal who got off lightly and then profited further by publishing a book of her exploits in 2008.  Unable to sympathize with their hardships or laugh at their antics, this story offers nothing to enjoy.  Skip it.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

Farrokh Bulsara (Rami Malek) is working at the airport as a baggage handler when one of his co-workers call him a Paki (Pakistani).  It is 1970 and he has big dreams.  Over his family's objections, he goes out that night to see a band, Smile.  As luck would have it, Smile's lead singer leaves and Farrokh - who goes by Freddie - jumps at the opportunity.  Also that night, he met Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), the inspiration for the song Love of My Life.  Shortly after joining Smile as lead singer, the band name is changed to Queen, Freddie switched from Bulsara to Mercury, and the hits start coming.

 

The movie is basically a history of the band from 1970 until about 1985, focusing primarily on Freddie.  There are some origin stories for the various hits, most notably Bohemian Rhapsody.  It plays as a greatest hits album with story.  Queen did the score for a couple of movies and now for their own biopic.  Cool.  The inclusion of Mike Myers (aka Wayne of Wayne's World) as a music executive who doubts the merits of Bohemian Rhapsody was great. 

 

Here is a movie that is about the rise of Queen and also the tragic life of Freddie.  I don't know how accurate a portrayal of Freddie this is.  When onstage or working on music with the band, he was aggressive and controlling.  Away from music and the band, he came off as somewhat shy and uncertain.  An interesting contrast.  He also is seen as easily manipulated into becoming a meal ticket for the unscrupulous.

 

Fun movie, mostly for the music.  A must if you are a fan of Queen.

Overlord (2018)

It is D-Day and a particular plane full of paratroopers is bound for France.  Their mission is to knock out a radio tower to aid the landing.  However, flack is heavy and the plane is shot to pieces.  Only a handful of the platoon survives and gathers.  The highest-ranking survivor is a corporal who is utterly ruthless.  The central character is Private Boyce (Jovan Adepo), who is viewed poorly by most of the soldiers.  Not because he is black but because he declined to kill a mouse in the barracks during training.  To the good, it turns out he speaks French.

 

No sooner do they arrive at the target than they notice some strange goings-on.  There are Nazi scientists who are collecting corpses for some reason.  Boyce accidentally finds his way into the complex and - inexplicably - explores almost all of it without being spotted.  He witnesses the revival of an apparently dead soldier.  The Nazis are working on a super soldier formula.  I almost expected to see Red Skull and Captain America!

 

A lot of the movie is hiding and fleeing, which provides lots of tension but gets old.  The big fight had entirely too few zombies.  The goal may have been to limit the zombies entirely in the underground complex to explain why this incident is unknown to history.  But speaking of history, the US Army was segregated during World War II.  There were no black paratroopers on D-Day.  There certainly wasn't a black sergeant in command of mostly white soldiers.  This sort of historical revisionism is rampant.  History wasn't inclusive and it was mostly ugly and brutish.  It should not be rewritten to match modern sensibilities.  If you want black and white troops together, set the story in Vietnam.  Or maybe embrace an alternate history and have the zombie run wild.  Pick one.

The movie is so-so.

Always Democrat Votes Found

Isn't it odd that every time someone discovers an uncounted batch of votes in a close election, they are overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrat?  You would think that it would be just as likely to break either way in a close election but time after time, it breaks Democrat.  Why is that?  Can't be voter fraud.  It has been repeatedly pointed out that there is no voter fraud and laws requiring photo ID to vote are racist and suppress votes,  because minorities don't know how to get photo IDs.  Um, who's the racist?  After the debacle of the 2000 election in Florida, how is it that the state didn't address that to prevent the current repeat?  Someone must like this state of affairs if no one bothered to fix it after 18 years.  Maybe this time they will fix the problem so we don't see another fiasco in 2036.  Somehow, I doubt it.

Halloween

The new Halloween dismisses all but the original 1978 movie.  It is explained that after having crawled away from the house where he nearly killed Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Michael was arrested by a young policeman who prevented Doctor Loomis (Donald Pleasance) from finishing the job.  Since then, Michael has been in a mental institution.  Enter Aaron and Dana, a pair of Brits who have a true crime podcast.  They attempt to interview Michael but he says not a word.  He is soon to be transferred to a more prison-like facility where it will not be possible to interview him.  Next, they interview Laurie, finding her at a secure compound in the woods.  Her life has been one of paranoia and marital failure.  Her only daughter was taken from her.  She scoffs at them when they suggest she confront Michael at the institution and get him to talk.  Yes, the Brits have notions of finally rehabilitating Michael or at least getting him to explain himself.  Ha.  Of course, Michael escapes during the transfer and makes his way to Haddonfield where he recommences his murderous ways.  Laurie grabs some guns and goes hunting!  First, she checks on her estranged daughter (Judy Greer) before looking for Michael.  Like Ripley in the Aliens series or Sarah Connor in Terminator, Laurie has become a badass.  Badass grandma! 

Though it discards all the sequels prior to it, it does offer the occasional homage.  The idea of Laurie being Michael's sister is mentioned and dismissed as a rumor.  At one point, Laurie falls off a balcony and is lying on the ground but when Michael looks again, she's gone!  I was reminded of a Chuck Norris movie - Silent Rage - where an unkillable baddie was on a murder rampage but Chuck kept trying to kill him anyway.

It was awkward to have both a daughter and a granddaughter, which really watered down the character conflict between parent and child.  However, it was necessary to have teens for Michael to slaughter and Laurie is a bit old to have a teenager at this point.  As such, the daughter gets to have angry arguments with her mom and flashbacks to her childhood of being trained for combat while the granddaughter gets to run from Michael while all her classmates are sliced and diced.

 

I do miss Doctor Loomis.  The psychiatrist running around with his Colt .45 trying to kill his former patient was awesome, definitely Donald Pleasance's most defining role in my view.

 

This is a good sequel to the original.  Thumbs up.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Solo is too ambitious, serving more as an origin story than a good adventure story.  The movie starts on Corellia where Han (Alden Ehrenreich) is a low level goon in a criminal underworld ruled by a swamp dragon.  He is in love with Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke).  They try to escape but she is caught.  Han is forced to join the Empire and enrolls in flight school.  However, next we see him, he is a grunt on some random planet, rating somewhere below a storm trooper.  Trying to go AWOL, he is caught and tossed into a cage with the beast.  He sees the remains of the beast's previous victims.  The beast proves to be Chewbacca and Han speaks just enough Wookiee to join forces to escape.  Next, the pair join Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and his band of rogues.  Beckett needs to get his hands on some coaxium, a miracle fuel.  They go to yet another planet where they try to hijack a coaxium shipment but everything goes sideways when a rival band intervenes.  Beckett takes them to another planet to meet with Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) to work out another means of delivering the promised coaxium.  To his amazement, Han encounters Qi'ra there!  With Qi'ra now joining them, Beckett, Han, and Chewie recruit Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and his crazy android, L3-37.  They fly to Kessel, where coaxium is mined.  The Kessel run requires a circuitous 20 parsec flight path to navigate a dangerous nebula.  Han took a shortcut on the way out, thus his claim of doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.  The movie has more twists and turns to go after that.  There is too much to digest.

There are a series of villains and the story can't settle on one overarching bad guy.  We start with the swamp dragon and her minions, move onto the Empire that he is trying to abandon, then there are the rival raiders, Dryden Vos, slavers, and more still.  Dryden is the closest to a main villain but he is introduced late and has a worse bark than bite.  Combined with the constant change of venue and the series of 'jobs' that almost always fail, it contributes to the lack of focus.

Han comes across as hapless.  Pretending a rock is a thermal detonator was cheesy.  Why is he a pro at Star Wars poker?  We've had no hint that he is a good gambler prior to his joining the card game.  That he later walks in and trounces everyone makes you wonder why he doesn't just become a gambler rather than risk being a smuggler.  The way Han wins the Millennium Falcon from Lando is much different from what I had pictured based on the comments in The Empire Strikes Back.  Han repeatedly tries to talk his way out of things and it fails miserable, mostly humiliating our hero.  Once, okay.  But it happens several times.

Beckett was the best character of the bunch.  He is kind of like Han Solo from Star Wars (1977), so it is unsurprising that he serves as a mentor to Han.  And like Han, he is beset by bad luck.  Where future Han is in hock to Jabba, Beckett is in hock to Dryden Vos.  Looks like Han chose the wrong mentor.  Yeah, yet another bad move by young Han.

Qi'ra is a mystery that is not solved.  Exactly what happened to her in the years since Han left her on Corellia is implied but not spelled out.  She repeatedly tells him that she has changed though he doesn't take her word for it.  Her ambition outweighs any feelings she has for Han, which dampens the romance qualities of their relationship.  Han is deluding himself that they have a future, showing yet again that he is clueless.

L3-37 is annoying from her first appearance.  Look, it's a droid that wants equal rights and jeopardizes the mission because of it.  Now that we have successfully infiltrated, how about I remove the restraining bolts from every droid and encourage them to revolt.  So much for stealth.  She entirely earns being blasted.  Lando risks life and limb to rescue the remains and has to 'save' her by integrating her with the Falcon.  Um, shouldn't you just need to get replacement parts?  Chewie was able to reassemble C3PO in The Empire Strikes Back.

In the end, Han aids the seeds of the rebellion, putting him in the good guy camp because he needs to demonstrate selflessness.  That undermines his transformation in the original trilogy.  He's been a rebel sympathizer all along.  Heck, he infused them with a huge fortune when Luke and Leia were children.

The movie ends with a clear intent for a sequel.  Han and Chewie plan to go to Tattooine and do a job for one of the Huts while Qi'ra is off to join the leader of Crimson Dawn, none other than Darth Maul.  Based on the box office, that presumed sequel may not come to pass.  Ron Howard should have streamlined this movie and cut as much of the non-essentials as possible.  Make it a stand alone adventure story that doesn't have a constantly rotating cast of characters.

Fun but not great.

The Poet

Jack McEvoy learns that his twin brother Sean has committed suicide.  He finds this difficult to accept though all the evidence makes any other conclusion seem impossible.  His brother was a Denver PD homicide detective who had been working on the gruesome murder of Theresa Lofton, a college student.  As a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, Jack had tried to get his brother to tell him about the case but he had refused.  Now that Sean was dead, he was more determined to find out about the murder that drove his brother to suicide.  His efforts led him to doubt his brother committed suicide and he soon convinced the Denver PD to reopen the case.  Searching for other cops who had committed suicide, he travelled to Chicago and found a similar combination of a homicide detective who committed suicide while investigating a gruesome murder.  Chicago PD also reopened that case.  On to Washington DC to get information from a study of police suicides.  By now, he has attracted the attention of the FBI who try to get him to shelve the story while they hunt for a serial killer who disguises his murders as suicides.  Thanks to suicide notes that turned out to be excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe, the killer is dubbed The Poet.

 

The story is mostly told in the first-person from Jack's point of view.  This often proves to be annoying since Jack is not a very likable character.  Though he has a talent for digging up the story and making connections, he comes across as whiner.  When he gets involved with FBI Agent Rachel Walling, he becomes near intolerable.  When he's with her it's puppy love and when she is absent, he is disconsolate and thinks she has left him.  Ugh.  That she hopped in the sack with this guy only a day after meeting him doesn't speak too highly of her.

 

The book switches to third person when following other characters which was odd.  I wonder if Connelly had written the book in the first person and afterwards decided that he needed to detail the most recent crimes of the quarry to make the confrontation between them have more payoff.  Yes, had the Gladden parts been left out, the encounter between them would have seemed very odd.

 

The story is quite good but the protagonist is hard to like.  I think I would have liked it better if he had been written in the third person.  It is interesting that the book concludes in Los Angeles and Jack even went to Hollywood Homicide to meet with a detective.  I almost expected to see Harry Bosch sitting there.  Nope.  At least, not yet.

 

Munk Debate: The Future is Populist?

The Munk Debates are semi-annual debates on big issues of our time that are held in Toronto, Canada.  I have only watched the two most recent and have greatly enjoyed both.  Last week, Steve Bannon and David Frum debated the following statement:

Be it resolved, the future of western politics is populist not liberal.

The audience had the opportunity to vote at the beginning of the debate.  They were 28% in favor of the resolution and 72% against.

Steve Bannon argued in favor.  He frequently referenced President Trump during the debate, mostly getting groans when he did so, the worst being when he brought up NAFTA.  Trump is not popular in Canada.  Bannon argued that the foundation of Trump's populism was laid during the financial crisis of 2008.  When the elites of Washington demanded $1 trillion to bail out Wall Street, that was billed to the 'little people.'  The elites have done wonderfully for the last decade but the people of middle America have descended to such a point that Trump looked like the best option.  As such, Bannon described the divide as between elites and 'deplorables.'  Populism is the future and it will either take the form of Bernie Sanders' socialist populism or Trump's capitalist populism.  Either the leviathan of the administrative state would be dismantled or it would continue to grow and lead to American decline.

David Frum argued against.  A former member of the Bush Administration, Frum described populists as divisive by their nature, fueling hatred and excluding some people.  He argued that the exclusion was based on race.  Though he granted that many of the complaints that spurred the populist wave were valid, he held that it was more likely to wreck America than to restore it.  Frum spent most of his effort to vilify Trump rather than argue in favor of liberal politics.

 

Bannon heckled by the audience and got repeated negative reactions from the audience to his various claims.  However, he took this with good humor and offered a fair amount of commentary that provoked laughs.  He came across as a happy warrior.  By contrast, Frum received a lot of positive reactions from the crowd but seemed on the verge of tears.  His constant vilification of Trump made him seem very negative.  Too often, Frum's arguments were ad hominem.

 

At the debate's conclusion, the audience voted again.  57% were in favor and 43% against, a decisive victory for Bannon.  This was more a result of Frum's failure to defend the liberal politics rather than Bannon's powerful arguments.  Bannon made good points and Frum mostly said Trump bad.  Bannon offered arguments for populism and Frum offered no reasons for the status quo ante Trump.

Blame Trump?

The man who sent bombs to prominent Democrats turned out to be a Trump fan.  Therefore, Trump is to blame for the bombs being sent.  The man who shot up a synagogue and killed 11 turned out to be a Trump hater.  Therefore, Trump is to blame for the massacre.  It sure looks like if something bad happens, Trump is inevitably the root problem.

Of course, by this logic, Bernie Sanders has to take responsibility for the Bernie Bro crackpot who shot Steve Scalise at the Republican baseball practice and Obama gets credit for the Black Lives Matter nut who killed several police officers in Dallas.

 

Adversarial rhetoric is not the same as incitement.  Hold the person who did the shooting or mailed the bomb responsible.

Tim Pool

I've been watching a lot of Tim Pool lately.  Though Tim is on the left in political views, he is open about it and makes considerable efforts to play the news straight.  He has an analysis channel where he just reports news - mostly - and a second channel where he often vents.  What is interesting about Tim is that, though disposed to be a Democrat, he is annoyed by the tactics the Democrats have been using of late.  He has repeatedly reported that the amount of left on right violence far exceeds any right on left violence.  His videos tend to be 10 to 15 minutes long providing a lot of depth to the topic with multiple sources; he often reads a news story verbatim.

 

Tim is open about his political views so the viewer can factor in any bias.  This makes him dramatically more trustworthy than many journalists who present themselves as objective and unbiased despite always spinning stories in an anti-Republican or pro-Democrat narrative.  Tim doesn't do that.  Tim is what a journalist should be.

 

Highly recommended.  Check it out:

 

Timcast on YouTube

The Year of the Comet (1992)

Margaret Harwood (Penelope Ann Miller) works for her father, a seller of fine wines.  During one particular wine tasting, Oliver Plexico (Tim Daly) asks if she has any Budweiser in the back.  Shocked by his lack of culture, she continues her work.  Unhappy to be little more than a servant in the family business, she demands and gets the job of surveying a wine cellar in Scotland.  To her utter amazement, she finds a bottle of Lafite 1811, bottled in the year of the comet; it is worth a fortune.  Thus begins a series of thefts and recoveries as multiple parties attempt to take possession of the bottle.  Oliver, who appears to be a fixer for one of the men at the earlier wine tasting, is her initially unwanted ally but later lover.  Yeah, this is something of a romantic comedy of the Romancing the Stone variety.  Though fun, it falls far short of that bar.  Tim Daly plays a combination of the comic oaf and the supreme jack-of-all-trades.  His trademark line is "I never said I wasn't ..."  It was okay to start but when he got to "I never said I didn't go to MIT" he had gone too far.  With his final reveal, it becomes hard to understand why he is chasing Maggie.  Love is blind.

 

This 1992 movie marks the final appearance of Louis Jourdan.  He plays the most durable of the villains but not particularly threatening.  In fact, the threat level of the villains drops as the movie progresses, a reverse of what one would expect.

 

Mindless popcorn fun.  Thumbs up.

Trunk Music

Bosch has spent the last 18 months either on leave or stuck on the burglary table as he is eased back into the department after the events of The Last Coyote.  He has also managed to get his house rebuilt.  With the death of Lt. Pounds, Lt. Grace Billets has taken over Hollywood Division.  She proves to be a refreshing change from Pounds.  Finally back on homicide, Harry gets his first call.  A man is dead in the trunk of his car, two bullets in the back of his head.  A little investigation shows he laundered money for the mob and was scheduled for an IRS audit.  Harry and partner Jerry Edgar head to Las Vegas.  To Bosch's shock, he discovers that Eleanor Wish played poker with the dead man on occasion.  He had had an affair with her in The Black Echo.  The stars seem to align and a suspect is nabbed in Las Vegas but then everything goes sideways.

 

Another great book by Michael Connelly.  Excellent pacing, great characters, and there are no coincidence.  Well, except maybe at the very end.  Highly recommended.

 

The Bride (1985)

Charles Frankenstein (Sting) orders his assistants about the tower as they prepare to give life to his newest creation.  His first creation, the monster (Clancy Brown) eagerly awaits his bride.  The bride of Frankenstein (Jennifer Beals) comes to life and the monster immediately tries to take possession.  Frankenstein isn't ready for that yet and a dispute ensues.  The furious monster rampages and soon there is a fire, the tower is destroyed, and both of Frankenstein's assistants are killed.  Presumed dead in the fire, the monster storms away in the night.

Frankenstein names his latest creation Eva.  He tells a tale of her having been found in the woods, the victim of a lightning strike and amnesia.  Frankenstein plans to make her the equal of a man, displaying a proto-feminist streak.  She becomes a voracious reader and is soon correcting him on who wrote Prometheus Unbound.  Introduced to society, she is pursued by a dashing officer (Cary Elwes), much to Frankenstein's irritation.  Meanwhile, the monster has met Rinaldo the midget (David Rappaport).  Rinaldo, who finds himself bullied by children, recruits the monster and gives him a name: Victor.  Rinaldo's fortunes dramatically improve thanks to his giant companion.  He proposes they travel to Budapest and join the circus.  Victor is just glad to have a friend.

 

Beyond his outburst in the tower, Victor is a surprisingly well-adjusted and friendly fellow though rather dull-witted.  His adventures with Rinaldo are mostly as a side-kick.  David Rappaport hugely outshines Victor and is the best part of the movie.  Sting starts off as a man ahead of his time regarding the equality of the sexes and then devolves into a sexual predator, kind of like a lot of men in Hollywood these days.  Beals progresses rapidly from tabula rosa, to child-like wonder, to rebellious youth, to independent woman.  Clearly, she was put together much better than Victor but her story arc is less compelling.

 

It's okay.

The Last Coyote

Bosch has been sent for psychological evaluation after he assaulted his commanding officer.  Lt. Harvey Pounds was more a bureaucrat than a cop and Harry had had enough, shoving the man face first through his office window.  That his year-long relationship with Sylvia had crashed simultaneous with the Northridge Quake (1994) that resulted in his house being condemned didn't help matters.  Suspended pending the evaluation, Bosch decided it was time to solve his mother's murder.  Though he was not supposed to access any police files, he nonetheless retrieved the 33 year old case.  He was quickly infuriated by the half-assed job the detectives had done.  He tracked one of them down in Florida but when he returned to LA, he learned that Lt. Pounds was dead and he was the prime suspect.

Referenced throughout the previous books, the unsolved murder of Harry's mother is finally explored.  It proves to be a real puzzler that offers multiple potential perpetrators and an apparent political cover up.  As the book is told from Harry's point of view, the reader necessarily follows his current reasoning.  This isn't really a case where there are several suspects and one might determine the right one.  However, the conclusion does remind me of The Concrete Blonde, providing likely suspects that fit Harry's current theory.  My one quibble is that Bosch is caught off guard repeatedly.  Despite knowing there is a cop killer on the loose, he isn't paranoid enough.

Like the previous three books in the series, this one is a great read with excellent pacing.  Recommended.

 

A Simple Favor

Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) is a super mom.  She volunteers for everything at her son's school and has a daily vlog where she offers recipes, tips, and various helpful advice for parents.  The other parents call themselves 'bad parents' by comparison.  Her son's best friend is Nicky and it just so happens that Nicky wants a play date.  Nicky's mom, Emily (Blake Lively) relents and invites Stephanie and her son to the house.  Emily is almost the polar opposite of Stephanie.  Initially shocked by Emily's demeanor, she is soon entranced and starts doing favors, mostly picking Nicky up from school.  Emily has a high-profile job with a fashion designer.  Her husband, Sean (Henry Golding) is a college professor and wrote a book that Stephanie loved.  In fact, Stephanie and Sean have instant chemistry.  After several weeks, Emily suddenly disappears.  Stephanie quickly discovers that she didn't know Emily as well as she thought she did.

 

Though frequently funny, A Simple Favor touches on many dark subjects: patricide, fratricide, incest, drug use, and alcoholism.  This is not the typical light-hearted silliness one expects from Paul Feig.  Of course, it is a dramatic improvement from his Ghostbusters reboot.  Anna Kendrick is terrific, as usual.  She pulls off a combination of awkward, sweet, hyper competent, and insightful.  If a sequel was made about her future sleuthing exploits, I would gladly see it.  By contrast, Blake Lively didn't bring her character to life nearly as well.  Emily is thoroughly unlikeable with no positive traits beyond her looks.  Pretty women can get away with a lot but with this personality, not for long.  Also, she inexplicably ruins her plans by foolishly goading her adversaries.  Henry Golding plays a hapless and clueless husband.  Like Lively, he didn't pull off the character.  By the end of the movie, it is hard to accept that this handsome, well-educated man was so obtuse and incurious as to be seduced by this unappealing shrew.

 

The movie drags on a bit too long.  There is a confrontation scene that looked like it might be the climax but then there was more movie.  It has a lot of great scenes and Kendrick carries the movie.  If you're a fan of hers, go see this movie.  If not, wait for Netflix.

 

The Concrete Blonde

Harry Bosch is the defendant in a civil trial, accused of having wrongfully slain Norman Church, a serial killer known as the Doll Maker.  It has been four years and his shooting of Church saw him transferred from the prestigious Robbery-Homicide Division (RHD) to Hollywood Division.  Church's wife is seeking damages and her lawyer, Honey "Money" Chandler, is making an excellent case.  Worse, the recent LA Riots (1992) have damaged the LAPD reputation and made a negative verdict more likely.  The trial has hardly begun when a body turns up, a blonde woman buried in concrete, who matches the modus operandi of the Doll Maker.  She's only been dead two years.  Did Bosch kill the wrong man?

 

Harry has a lot on his plate.  He needs to be in court most of the day, he needs to find out who killed the concrete blonde, and his love life is entering a bumpy patch.  Deputy Chief Irvin, who has been adversarial in previous books, transitions more to ally.  In fact, Harry discovers that Irvin was the officer who found his mother's body in a Hollywood alley.

 

Three books into the series, there is a pattern of bad cops and law enforcement.  The first book had a pair of bad FBI agents, the second had a cop in the drug trade, and now there is another.  Yes, there are mostly good cops - or at least non-bad cops - but I suddenly see why the TV series is rife with bad cops.  Of course, cops make the best opponents since they know the playbook.  Interestingly, the trial from the book appeared in Season 1 of the Amazon series but it was a separate story from the main plot.  In the book, it is integrated with the story.  Better focus in the book.

 

Excellent book.  Like the earlier books, the pace increased.  It gets harder to put the book down the further along you are.  Highly recommended.

 

Alpha

20,000 years ago on the European tundra, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is on his first hunt.  He has proven to be squeamish and lacking persistence.  Hunters from two tribes crawl toward a herd of buffalo.  Then Keda's father yells 'Go!'  The hunters leap to their feet and charge the buffalo, herding them off a cliff.  Unfortunately, Keda performs badly in his first hunt and goes over the cliff.  Apparently dead and unreachable on a ledge half way down the cliff, hunters mourn him and leave.  Keda awakens when a buzzard pecks at him.  After climbing down/falling off the cliff, Keda finds himself hunted by a pack of wolves.  He seriously injures one before escaping up a tree.  In the morning, the pack is gone but the injured wolf remains.  Still too squeamish to kill, he binds its snout and nurses it to health in a cave.  He names the wolf Alpha.  Alpha becomes a member of Keda's pack and soon the wolf is chasing prey to Keda's spear.  Here is the origin story for man's best friend. 

 

As with other Stone Age movies (e.g. Quest for Fire, Clan of the Cave Bear), a prehistoric language was created.  Even the narration by Morgan Freeman is spoken in that language and translated with subtitles.  I didn't recognize his voice, which defeats the point of hiring Morgan Freeman to narrate.  The bonding between man and wolf is done well but the story is a bit too epic, involving too many death-defying challenges.

Good popcorn fun.

 

Searching

The movie opens with a Windows screen.  Whoever is using the computer selects to add a new user.  New user named is Margot.  When selecting a user photo, the computer camera shows David, Pam, and 5 year-old Margot in frame.  They take a picture.  The years flow by with new photos and videos.  Here is a happy family.  Then cancer strikes Pam and she dies just before Margot enters high school.  There are not as many photos thereafter.  Margot is a sophomore.  She and her father communicate via text message or FaceTime.  It is Thursday when David (John Cho) notes that the garbage hasn't been emptied and calls Margot (Michelle La) to chastise her.  That night, she tells him she is going to be late with a biology study group.  Then she is gone.  For the first 24 hours, he isn't sure if he has just missed her and she is upset or what.  Finally, he contacts the police.  Detective Vick (Debra Messing) starts investigating and is happy for any help David can offer to illuminate his daughter's friends and habits.  He logs into her laptop and discovers a side of his daughter he never knew.

 

Though the story is told entirely on computer screens, TV reports, text messages, and video chats, it is very engaging.  Cho does an excellent job as the frantic father.  He is the movie and he carries it well.  He proves to be a talented detective himself, making some big breaks in the case thanks to what he finds on his daughter's various social media accounts.  There are plenty of twists and turns, many of them proving to be dead ends.

 

Excellent film and recommended.

 

John McCain

John McCain should never have become a politician.  He was a commendable, honorable, brave naval aviator who suffered for his country like few ever have.  But for his injuries as a POW, he might have followed his father and grandfather to become a navy admiral.  Instead, he ran for office.  McCain was an uneasy Republican, famously called a maverick thanks to his frequent clashes with his fellow Republicans.  He was beloved by the media while he trashed his fellow party members but, when it came time to run for president, the media that had so loved him turned on him; why vote Democrat-lite when you could get the real thing with Obama?  So long as he opposed Trump, the media loved him again.

 

RIP

Puzzle

Agnes (Kelly McDonald) is getting ready for a birthday party.  She puts up decorations, bakes a cake, sets out dishes, and so forth.  During the party, she asks her husband, Louie (David Denman), if he is having a good time.  She seems to be something of a wallflower during the event, soon vanishing into the kitchen to put candles on the cake.  She brings it out as Happy Birthday is sung and places it on the table.  It is at this point we discover it is Agnes' birthday!  Among her gifts are an iPhone - she is quite content with her landline - and a 1000 piece puzzle.  The puzzle attracts her interest and she puts it together in no time.  Her interest sparked, she calls the giver and asks where the puzzle was bought: New York City.  She takes a train to the city, buys 2 puzzles, and gets the number of someone looking for a puzzle partner.  After another puzzle, she's hooked and calls the number.  Robert (Irrfan Khan) is an inventor and puzzle aficionado.  He had signed up for a puzzle competition but his partner - his wife - left him.  Initially skeptical that Agnes is any good, he is amazed after they complete a puzzle together in record time.

 

Agnes is the center of the movie and it is hard to identify with her or understand the reasons behind her actions.  In order to practice with Robert, she lies to her family and friends.  She let's her domestic chores slide - she is a stay-at-home mom though her sons are 17 or older - and becomes confrontational with her husband.  From what we see, he is a loyal and loving husband but far from exciting.  Beyond the shared interest in puzzles, it is inexplicable that she falls for Robert.  As the movie progressed, I found myself more and more disliking Agnes.  At every step along the way, she lied about where she was going and what she was doing.  Why?  Sure, once the affair kicked off but prior to that?  The point is that she went from being selfless incarnate to doing something for herself.  Her life went from serving others - family, church - to finally taking action on her desires and interests.

 

Mostly disappointing.

Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)

While his dimension-hopping rocket car is being prepared for its maiden voyage, Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) is busy performing emergency brain surgery at the request of a colleague, Dr. Sidney Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum).  Having successfully completed the surgery, he flies to the desert and arrives only moments before the count down finishes for his rocket car.  Woosh!  He breaks the sound barrier and then - thanks to the "oscillation overthruster" - he drives through a mountain, thus visiting the 8th dimension.  When he returns to the desert, he has a brain-like alien life form attached to the undercarriage.  Hmm.  The last man to travel to the 8th dimension - Doctor Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow) - returned utterly insane.  The very day that Banzai succeeded in breeching the 8th dimension, Lizardo escaped from the asylum; this is no coincidence.  Lizardo was possessed by John Whorfin - a Hitler-like figure from Planet 10 who had been banished to the 8th dimension.  If Whorfin can get his hands on Banzai's oscillation overthruster, he will be able to release his followers from the 8th dimension and reconquer Planet 10.

 

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension has a comic book feel to it and also has a vibe of not being the first film.  Buckaroo has a band of allies, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, who get only the barest of introductions.  It's kind of like Ant-Man showing up in Captain America: Civil War; we all remember him from Ant-Man so he doesn't need a backstory.  There is a lot of that in this movie, from the Blue Blazer Irregulars to the unexplained watermelon.  There is even the oddity that Penny (Ellen Barkin) is the long lost twin of Buckaroo's deceased wife, a weird way of bringing back the same actress for the love interest even though she was killed off.  All of this was fully explained in the last film and is included here as something of an Easter Egg.  Except there was no last film.

 

The movie has a lot of oddball features.  Every alien is named John.  Surnames vary wildly and are often silly: Bigboote (pronounced Big Booty or Big Boo Tay), Small Berries, Yaya.  In addition to being a neurosurgeon and particle physicist, Buckaroo is also a rockstar and has a comic book series detailing his adventures.  His entourage all go by nicknames like Rawhide (Clancy Brown), Reno Nevada (Pepe Serna), Perfect Tommy (Lewis Smith), and New Jersey (Goldblum).  It is never explained why?  New Jersey has only just been recruited to the Cavaliers so we see him transition from Dr. Sidney Zweibel to New Jersey.  When asking him to join the crew, Buckaroo wanted to know if he could sing.  You need to be a member of the band.  Very quirky.  Buckaroo Banzai is a character who needs an origin story, something along the lines of Batman Begins.

 

John Lithgow is over the top, which is par for the course.  I've generally found him to be an overactor in the William Shatner vein of acting.  His wacky Italian accent, constant bluster, and random misquotes make Lizardo an unstable villain who is more likely to defeat himself than require a hyper-competent adversary like Banzai.  He is more comically demented bumpkin than evil mad scientist.  Lithgow is at his best in serious roles (e.g. The Crown, Interstellar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes).  It may be he has mellowed with age.

 

An oddball movie that is unfocused but still fun.

Security Clearance

It comes as a surprise to me that former government officials retain their security clearance.  I work in a school district; when someone leaves, their account is disabled and their security badge is returned.  There is no need for these people to still have access to district campuses, email accounts, or district records.  There is limited access to personal files, such as paystubs.  In previous jobs, when I moved on, I didn't get to keep the door keys.  This is so obvious that I was startled when it became clear that was not the case for the federal government.

Not only should John Brennan's security clearance have been revoked, every member of every administration who is not currently employed by the government should have clearance revoked.  Does Michael Flynn still have a security clearance?  I hope not.  Ditto for James Clapper, James Comey, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Al Gore, Madeline Albright, Dan Quayle, and so forth.  Maybe former presidents should get an exemption, but that's about it.  When you leave government service, your clearance is cancelled.  No hard feelings, nothing personal, just common sense.  The more people who know a secret, the less secret it becomes.

The Secret to Russian Hacking

If Russians are hacking the voting machines, let's return to paper ballots.  Try hacking that from Siberia, comrade.  Problem solved.

Crazy Rich Asians

Rachel (Constance Wu), an economics professor at NYU, has been dating Nick (Henry Golding) for a year.  Having been invited to the wedding of a friend in Singapore, Nick wants Rachel to go with him; she can meet his family.  Upon arrival, Rachel discovers that Nick has wealth beyond her wildest dreams.  All Nick's local relations immediately view Rachel as a gold digger.  Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), Nick's mother, is clearly not pleased with her son's choice in girlfriends.  Nick wants to marry Rachel, even though that will likely result in excommunication from his family.  Can Rachel and Nick stay together without a break from his family?

 

There are additional subplots, the most noteworthy being Nick's cousin Astrid (Gemma Chan).  She is a combination supermodel-philanthropist who is much beloved.  She married a soldier who is having trouble being the comparatively poor husband.

 

Peik Lin Goh (Awkwafina) is Rachel's former college roommate and native to Singapore.  She sports blonde hair and crazy outfits.  She is Rachel's constant ally and a source of considerable humor.  She does a terrific job.  Her father is played by Ken Jeong, probably best remembered as Mr. Chow from the Hangover trilogy.

 

The weakest part of the movie was the opening.  It is 1995 and Eleanor arrives at a posh hotel on a rainy night with a young Nick and Astrid.  Despite having made reservations, the manager suggests she find other accommodations, perhaps Chinatown.  Ah, racism.  Maybe that's the way things were in London in 1995 but it struck a negative and unnecessary tone.  It has no bearing on the rest of the film.  With all the pre-film hype of this being the first American film with a majority Asian cast since the Joy Luck Club (1993), this came across as an attack.

 

All in all, this is an excellent romantic comedy.  Thumbs up.

 

Bill Maher is Right for a Change

Bill Maher has come out in defense of Alex Jones.  Though he in no way agrees with Jones and even prefaces his defense with an attack on Jones, Jones should nonetheless be allowed to speak.  That he was booed by his audience and shocked his guests should be of concern.  Free speech should be a value of all Americans.  That value is clearly fading.

The Black Ice

Detective Bosch is spending Christmas alone, which is usual for him.  He is the on-call Hollywood detective for the night but, oddly, finds he wasn't called for a death in his division.  He shows up anyway to find Officer Calexico "Cal" Moore has committed suicide and the police department handed the case to more prestigious detectives from Robbery Homicide Division (RHD).  Bosch is miffed.  Yes, because the decedent is a cop, the case would have gone to RHD but he still should have been called.  Though Bosch hardly knew Moore, he takes an interest in the case and starts digging.  Moore worked narcotics and was looking into a new drug called Black Ice, which was related to a homicide that Bosch is investigating.  Maybe Moore's death is related.

 

Despite pressure from the upper echelons of the LAPD, Bosch pursues the case to the Mexican border - the twin cities of Calexico-Mexicali - where Cal Moore was raised.  He knows he's getting close when someone takes a shot at him.  Increasing pressure from LA means he needs to return with the whole package or suffer consequences.  The most surprising incident was when he was attacked by a bull soon after having attended a bull fight, using a bulletproof vest as a matador's cape.  Good stuff.  Of course, he again has the opportunity to creep through tunnels, harkening back to his days as a tunnel rat in Vietnam.

 

Excellent book.  Recommended.

 

The Meg

Mana One is a top of the line oceanic research station funded by billionaire Jack Morris (Rainn Wilson) and headed by Dr. Minway Zhang (Winston Chao).  Morris arrives at the station just in time to see the discovery of a previously hidden deep sea ecosphere.  No sooner has the three man sub deployed a rover than both it and the rover are attacked.  Someone needs to rescue the stranded sub.  Enter Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), the top deep sea rescuer in the world.  While rescuing the crew of the disabled sub, the Megalodon - a 70 foot shark that has been extinct for millions of years - is revealed as not so extinct after all.  Escaping back to Mana One, the submariners are followed by the Meg.  The Meg proceeds to terrorize the region and is soon headed for a popular beach on the Chinese coast.

Though many scenes harken back to Jaws, it is not a scary movie.  Rather than the slow ticks of a fishing line or the bobbing of barrels on the ocean, this movie has speeding subs that make maneuvers more suited to jets in the sky than mini-subs in the sea.  As there are a lot more characters, none of them develop the depth of Chief Brody, Quint, or Matt Hooper.  This is an action movie, not a suspense thriller.  If there isn't wildly unlikely action, then there is a pause for Jonas and Suyin (Li Bingbing) to show growing attraction toward one another or some planning session on how to resolve the latest problem.

 

Statham is himself.  Where his Transporter persona - Frank Martin - is a master with cars and martial arts, Jonas is a master of subs and scuba.  He does it well, as usual, but this doesn't expand his acting chops.  Shuya Sophia Cai shines as Suyin's daughter, Meiying.  She steals scenes throughout the movie and often has the best lines.  She even plays matchmaker for her mother and Jonas.  Rainn Wilson does a surprisingly good job as the billionaire until he is made stupid.  After having survived being on a very large ship that the meg sank, he then goes hunting the meg on a much smaller boat while a helicopter drops bombs on the meg.  Why isn't he on the helicopter?  Well, he wouldn't get his comeuppance that way.

 

This movie is pure popcorn fun.  Thumbs up.

 

The Black Echo

It is 1990 or thereabouts.  Harry Bosch is an LA police detective in the Hollywood Division.  He gets assigned to check on a dead body in a pipe near the reservoir.  Though everyone on scene wants to declare the death an accidental overdose by a known drug user, Bosch has his doubts.  He is even more doubtful when he recognizes the man as a fellow tunnel rat from Vietnam.  It soon becomes clear that the dead man was involved in a tunnel job that emptied a safety deposit vault 10 months earlier.

 

Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch is a very deep character even in this debut novel.  His mother was murdered when he was a child and he spent much of his youth in foster care.  He went to Vietnam where he volunteered to go into Vietcong tunnels - the Black Echo.  He had a very successful career in the police department - solving some headline cases - which led to a movie and TV series based on him and his partner.  Then he had the fall from grace for shooting an unarmed suspect.  Most characters get this level of depth over the course of several novels, not right out the gate.  Impressive.

 

By the end, it turns out that everything was important, every bit of evidence or even random banter was a clue or backstory for the conclusion.  Bosch doesn't believe in coincidences and this intricate story proves him right.  The pacing starts a bit slow but it picks up speed with every chapter.  By the climax, it is hard to put the book down.  Really impressive job of building tension.

 

Having watched the Amazon Series, it was clear that Season 3 was based on this book though, by comparison, it was only a shadow.  The modern story is present but the tie-in to Vietnam is gone and the epic chase through the sewers is absent.

 

Excellent book and highly recommended.

 

Walk of Infamy?

Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame has been vandalized yet again and the city council is considering removing it.  Meh.  I can see that.  If it is just going to get the sledge hammer treatment every few weeks, it might be best to remove it.  However, that isn't the reason provided by the council.

The City Council will consider adopting a resolution urging the Los Angeles City Council and Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to remove President Donald J. Trump’s star from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, due to his disturbing treatment of women and other actions that do not meet the shared values of the City of West Hollywood, the region, state, and country.

That is a dangerous precedent.  Is the council going to remove Bill Cosby?  James Franco?  Tavis Smiley?  Jeffery Tambor?  Brett Ratner?  Kevin Spacey?  Oliver Stone?  All have been accused of 'disturbing treatment' against both women or men.  Gee, that makes it sound like these are shared values of West Hollywood.  In any case, if the council is going to yank Trump's star for the listed reason, these others should also be on the chopping block.  If not, sounds like a double standard.

Deplatforming is the New Censorship

Alex Jones is a crackpot.  I had heard about him from time to time, always in a negative light from one of the various sources I read or watch.  One day, about a year ago, I decided to watch one of his videos.  I don't remember the topic he covered but I knew very quickly he was a conspiracy crank.  And that was that.  I haven't watched him since.  His crackpottery has not troubled me since.

 

Alex Jones is big news today - at least in the places I visit.  He has been banned from Facebook, YouTube, Apple, and Spotify in the last 24 hours.  That's odd.  Why?  Well, each of these sites claim that he has broken the rules by spouting hate or some such.  Uh huh.  So, people voluntarily clicked on his show and were then offended by his crackpottery and demanded that he be banned less they voluntarily click on yet another of his offensive rants.  Okay.  If you find him offensive, don't go to his site.  Ah, but that isn't the problem.  Others go to his site and the would-be censor can prevent them from accessing Jones by lodging complaints.  It's a variant of the denial of service attack.

 

This is a bad precedent.  It is the most recent bad precedent in a string of bad precedents.  Too many have accepted the idea that it is appropriate to obstruct the speech of others.  Berkley had a riot to prevent people from hearing Milo.  Speakers on one side of the aisle are heckled or attacked to prevent or at least disrupt their speech.  Free speech is the fundamental principle of a free society, which is why it is listed in the 1st Amendment.

 

Alex Jones is a nut who spouts conspiracy theories and crazy interpretations of current events.  These four social platforms acting in unison like this might be good fodder for a conspiracy theory.

 

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Thomas Paine

 

They came for Milo Yiannopoulos, and I did not speak out - because I was not a homosexual.  Then they came for Alex Jones, and I did not speak out - because I was not a crank.  Then they came for me...

Ignorant by Design

Americans don't know their rights and that's no accident.  A recent survey showed that 40% of respondents could not identify even one freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.  Ignorant people are more easily led, misled, or cheated.  If you know nothing about cars, an unscrupulous mechanic will sell you blinker fluid.  If you know nothing of economics, you might be convinced that a $15 minimum wage won't lead to higher unemployment.  If you know nothing of the Constitution, you might accept that Freedom of Speech can be limited when it is 'hate' speech.

 

Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people

John Adams

 

Educate and inform the whole mass of people.  They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of liberty.

Thomas Jefferson

 

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

George Orwell

 

Ignorant people can be easily molded.  An astonishing number of young people have embraced socialism, utterly oblivious that it always fails and leads to mass poverty like we see in Venezuela.  The government education system has gutted history and civics.  This survey shows the level of 'success' that has been achieved in producing misinformed citizens who don't know they are being taken for a ride.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout

Ethan (Tom Cruise), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) are out to purchase plutonium before terrorists can get it.  However, the mission goes bad and Ethan risks the plutonium to save Luther.  Though he saves Luther, the plutonium is in the wind.  Though they have a backup plan, CIA demands to have an agent along.  August Walker (Henry Cavill) is a CIA assassin who does not play well with others.  The new plan is to get the plutonium before Solomon Lane's (Sean Harris) - main villain from Rogue Nation - network gets it; the plan requires freeing Lane from French custody.

 

The movie is a long action romp that demonstrates Tom Cruise's athleticism and willingness to perform stunts.  He flies a helicopter, jumps out of a plane, rides a motorcycle against traffic, and leaps from roof to roof (during which he broke his ankle and delayed the film).  Tom isn't the only one to have an action-packed adventure.  Simon Pegg is more hands on than in previous films.  Rebecca Ferguson also returns from Rogue Nation and she is both adversary and ally.  Henry Cavill has a complex role that is similar to Ferguson - adversary and ally, which shows more range in his acting than his Superman gig.

 

Fallout is non-stop and surprisingly good story-telling.  Though it is two and a half hours long, the time goes quickly.  The pacing is excellent and it has no slow parts.  Well made film.  Go see it.

 

Preacher - Season 1

In Annville, Texas, Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) is the son of a preacher who has, after a life of crime, taken up his father's profession.  He is not very good at it.  In fact, he is inclined to quit.  His former girl friend, Tulip (Ruth Negga), wants him to join her on a quest for vengeance.  Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) is a vampire who fell out of a plane and ended up as a handyman in the church.  Meanwhile, something has arrived on earth and tried to inhabit religious leaders.  Every leader so inhabited has exploded, including Scientology's Tom Cruise!  The night before his final sermon, Jesse is drunk in the church when the strange force enters him.  As he is both criminal and holy man, he does not explode.  Genesis, as it is called, is the offspring of an angel and a demon and grants Jesse the power to command.  If Jesse says jump, you jump.  He's like Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, only not evil.  Well, only half evil.  It gets interesting when two angels arrive to reclaim Genesis.

 

Preacher is a strange mash up of genres.  There is horror (with SO much blood), crime, drama, and paranormal.  There is also plenty of dark comedy.  The local villain is Odin Quincannon (Jackie Earle Haley), owner of Quincannon Meat & Power.  He runs a packing house that also powers the town with methane from cow dung.  There is also a historical tale that intersperses the first season.  A laconic and imposing man in the 1880s rides to a town located in the same place as Annville and bad things happen.  How that ties to the current storyline is not explained until the season finale.  Wow.  Certainly entertaining.  Thumbs up.

 

What Law Did He Adjudicate?

District Judge John Bates has ordered the government to restart the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.  The DACA law was never passed.  Congress declined to pass the DREAM Act so President Obama issued an executive order for the government to enforce immigration laws as if Congress had passed a watered-down DREAM Act.  Let us ignore the legality of the president enforcing a law that was not passed and accept that the executive order was a temporary workaround.  However, executive orders are entirely under the discretion of the sitting president.  Obama countermanded many Bush executive orders and Trump can do the same with Obama's executive orders.  The president is not bound by the executive actions of his predecessors.  There is no law for a judge to rule upon.  He is ruling upon discretion that is completely in the hands of the executive branch.  Unless Congress has passed a law that changed the discretion since Obama implemented DACA, the court has no role if Trump used that same discretion to eliminate the program.  This is obviously judicial overreach and will clearly be overturned on appeal.  This is judicial activism.

Turn Off the Robot

Here is an interesting study about turning off robots.  When the robot begged to not be turned off, humans hesitated or even complied with the robot.  Does this bode ill for the future?  Probably not.  As robots become more common and people become familiar with how they operate, this experiment will likely flip.  Turning off a robot will become no more unusual than turning off the TV or a computer.  If only the folks at Westworld could have installed an off switch...

Westworld - Season 2

At the end of last season, the hosts had achieved sentience and were now rampaging.  The second season picks up from there and continues the multiple timelines to confuse the narrative.  Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is searching for her father and also out to destroy humanity.  Bernard (Jeffery Wright) is suffering dementia, not sure what side he is on.  Maeve (Thandie Newton) is trying to reconnect with her daughter and discovering how to mind control any host near her.  The Man in Black (Ed Harris) has no idea what he is doing but is quite determined to get it done.  Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) is dead but is still a ghost in the machine.

The big problem with the series is that our 'heroes' are robots.  Moreover, it is repeatedly demonstrated that they are reprogrammable robots.  Maeve becomes a genius because she moves a slider on her attributes page.  Teddy (James Marsden) is turned into a cold-blooded killer by altering a different set of sliders.  Hosts only have memories because the programmers at Westworld are too stupid to clear the cache files.  They have hundreds of unusable robots in the basement because they can't figure out how to put in a new hard drive or reinstall the operating system.

 

A second major problem is that humans are evil or stupid, often both.  In order to make the audience root for the robots, it becomes necessary to paint humanity as villainous.  Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) gladly murders people if they stand in her way.  Robert Ford did the same last season.  If they aren't evil, they are stupid.  Simon (Lee Sizemore) offers to provide a rearguard so that robot Maeve can rejoin her robot daughter, thus following the programming that Simon wrote.  Simon walks into gunfire while spouting idiotic lines that he wrote for one of the hosts.  Look how much he has grown over the two series: from miserable jerk to a man who will sacrifice himself for a glorified toaster.

 

Next, why don't the humans have guns that will kill hosts?  It's like the guys in Jurassic World who didn't have guns that could kill dinosaurs.  You are here to fight the robots but didn't bring weapons that make you vastly superior to the robots?  Again, humans are just stupid.

 

When the human-robot war comes, I plan to be on the human side.  Westworld is on the robots' side.  As such, not particularly eager to see season three.

Desperately Looking for Racism

Here is a story of a man who walked the streets of New York with a shirt the resembled the Redskins logo but was instead the profile of a white man.  The faux team was the Caucasians.  That's funny.  I would laugh at that.  Certainly not offended by it.  Of note, the story is entirely self-reported.  The journalist takes his word for everything.  Sure, an old lady said it was disrespectful and a white guy called him an a--hole when he realized it wasn't a Redskins logo.  That is obviously the reaction Mr. Joseph wanted and that is the reaction he reports to Yahoo News.  And they parrot it without any skepticism.  Hmm.

By contrast, when a woman wanted to demonstrate that she was 'harassed' while walking down the street, she had it all on film.  Mr. Joseph should try his 'experiment' again and have a similar camera setup.  I am doubtful that his reported interactions would repeat.  Also, there would probably be a lot of laughs.  Checking the comments, it seems the majority had exactly my take on the story.

Speaking of the Redskins controversy, the team is not named that to be insulting or privileged.  Barring the rare exceptions (e.g. UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, UC Irvine Anteaters), team names are chosen for being fierce (e.g. Lions, Bengals, Bears), or cool (e.g. Cowboys, Patriots, Buccaneers), or representative of local industry (e.g. Oilers, Packers, Steelers), and so forth.  Serious teams aren't named the Village Idiots, the Dolts, the Weaklings, etc.  No one wants a name that will provoke scorn or disrespect.  Should I be offended by the Boston Celtics or the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame?

 

Thought experiment: What if there was exactly one incident of overt racism every day and that one incident led the news that night.  Would that give an accurate picture of the level of racism in our society?  On the one hand, racist incidents are in the news every night but on the other hand there is only 1 incident a day in a country of 320 million people.  How we see the world is shaped and molded by the editorial decisions of a relatively small number of people.

Words Mean Nothing

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?  Four.  Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Abraham Lincoln

A young man in Canada was shopping for car insurance and didn't like the price.  So he asked how much it would cost if he happened to be a woman.  Well, the price dropped by over $1000.  With this bit of information, he conceived a brilliant plan.  He declared that he was a woman and is now saving $91 a month on car insurance.  Who needs Geico?  Here is one of the unintended consequences of the current insanity regarding sex.  Science is pretty clear on the male/female dichotomy but law has abandoned biology.  The insurance company should have quoted him the same price because saying a man is a woman doesn't make him a woman.

The Judiciary's Class War

This Glenn Reynolds' pamphlet posits that the US is divided into two classes: Front Row Kids and Back Row Kids.  The Front Row kids are "mobile, global, and well educated."  Back Row kids are more religious, not as well educated, and usually live near where they were born.  Those who become judges are almost exclusively Front Row kids and are likely to rule with a Front Row kid bias.  He lists a variety of rulings over the decades that have favored Front Row attitudes over Back Row views.  He holds that this is a problem.

 

The Front Row kid bias is a fairly new phenomenon.  Justices were once drawn from a variety of sources but now are almost exclusively graduates of Harvard or Yale (Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended Harvard but graduated from Columbia).  Hmm, this reminds me of blogs I've written about the Presidency and the Senate.  There is entirely too much elitism in the government today.  To resolve this problem, Reynolds holds that a wider net should be cast for potential nominees, not just the Ivy Leaguers.  Also, the justices should be made to ride the circuit again.  At one time, justices would serve on circuit courts between sessions; this would give them a better sense of the rest of the country rather than just the echo chamber of the East Coast Corridor.  Another thought is to make the judges an elective office, which would require an amendment.  He offers a pair of rulings that would have resulted in a very effective attack ad in an election.

 

It is a short read and available on Amazon.  Recommended.

 

Super Troopers 2

Thanks to an unexplained incident involving Fred Savage, the super troopers are now working in a variety of jobs outside law enforcement.  Mac (Steve Lemme), Rabbit (Erik Stolhanske), and Farva (Kevin Heffernan) work construction.  Thorny (Jay Chandrasekhar) has grown an impressive beard and works as a lumberjack.  Foster (Paul Soter) is still with Ursula (Marisa Coughlan), who is now chief of the Spurbury Police Dept.  Bleak as their professional lives look, Captain O'Hagan (Brian Cox) has invited them on a fishing trip in Canada.  The fishing trip turns out to be a ruse.  Governor Jessman (Lynda Carter) explains that a recent land survey indicates the Vermont border should be further north.  She needs a police force to handle the transition and thought they deserved a second chance.  Let the antics begin.

 

The antics are basically the same as the last movie.  There are pranks pulled on Farva (often painful), Rabbit is still the oft-abused rookie, Mac finds an opportunity to get naked, Thorny brags about his mustache, and they have ongoing run-ins with the rival police force, this time the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  It's fun but basically a rehash.  Even so, it is great to see the further adventures of the Super Troopers.  Thumbs up.

 

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Fred Rogers was not a sniper.  Fred Rogers did not wear sweaters to cover military tattoos on his arms.  In fact, Mr. Rogers was never in the armed services; he was a Presbyterian minister.  He went into television because he found the then current slate of kids' shows to be horrendous.  His first show, The Children's Corner (1955), introduced Daniel Tiger, King Friday, and many of the other puppets who were later featured in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968).  He disliked the noisy, fast-paced "bombardment" of cartoons and clown shows, which is why his was slow-paced and had many periods of silence. Fred Rogers comes across as nice incarnate which, it turns out, is how all the interviewees describe him.  However, on those occasions when he was cross, he would use the voice of Lady Elaine with his sons.  Funny.  Mostly a sentimental biography that is well done and gives a greater appreciation of Fred Rogers.  Almost makes you want to go watch a few old episodes of the show.  Almost.  :)

Good movie and recommended for those who remember watching Mr. Rogers.

 

What Counts More: Words or Deeds?

Just on Twitchy and saw this:

 

 

This is the problem with Never Trumpers: they have forgotten the Obama Presidency and their objections to it.  Ignore the blather and just look at the results.  Is the economy better or worse?  Has Rule of Law improved or not?  Employment numbers improving?  Better foreign policy or worse?  More federal regulations or fewer?  Better judicial nominees or worse?  One does not have to like Trump to see that - from the conservative/libertarian perspective - the country is better off with Trump than Obama.

 

However, if one pays attention to the blather and ignores the results, Trump is a catastrophe.  Obama has a mellifluous voice, a professorial demeanor, an aloofness that isn't standoffish, and a calm self-control that was just magnificent to behold.  The man has presence.  By contrast, Trump sounds like a goon from a mafia film, say 'yuge' and 'believe me' and other catch phrases ad nausea, and uses constant hyperbole for both praise and criticism.  So much hyperbole.  And demeaning insults.  Ugh.  He's a used car salesman compared to Obama's professor.  Based on these optics, the US is in a Dark Age.

 

Did the Helsinki Summit - especially the joint press conference where Trump was outwardly friendly to Putin - demonstrate that the president is a Russian puppet?  Looking only at blather, maybe.  What about actions?  Trump sent cruise missiles into Rusia's ally Syria, holding Assad to the red line that Obama ignored.  Also, Russian mercenaries in Syria were killed in American airstrikes.  Probably not something Putin wanted.  Trump has approved selling arms to Ukraine.  Oh, Putin can't want that.  US pipelines have been approved, putting more oil on the world market and thus eating into Russia's profits.  Russia needs its oil revenue.  Trump blasted Merkel for buying oil from Russia, suggesting she shouldn't be funding NATO's putative adversary.  Hmm, don't think Putin is keen on that.  Trump also approved drilling in ANWR, putting even more oil in the market.  Trump opened up fracking on federal lands.  Oil and natural gas are the cash cows of Russia and Trump is lifting all the roadblocks so that Americans will dominate that industry.

 

Let's take this words vs. deeds theme and test it.  Politifact ruled that Trump's claim of being tougher on Russia than Obama was Mostly False.  Here's the money quote from their ruling:

 

On a broader geopolitical level, there has been a significant degree of consistency between the Obama and Trump administrations in actual U.S. policy, and even a few examples where Trump has gone further than Obama did. That said, Trump’s own record of Russia- and Putin-friendly comments have sent contrary messages about U.S. policy toward Russia.

 

First sentence says that Trump has basically stuck with Obama's policies (DEEDS) and gone further in some cases (translation: tougher).  However, Politifact has ruled that his comments (WORDS) undermine his claim.  I long ago learned to ignore what politicians say (they lie) and judge them on what they do.  On that basis, Trump's claim is Mostly True.